Citation Guard — Fetch-Verify Every Quote & Grade It
Fact-check a draft's quotes and links before publishing: catches fabricated, misleading or dead citations and unsourced claims, graded worst-first. Extracts every quote, statistic and sourced claim from a draft (newsletter, article, blog post, report), fetches each linked source and grades it VERBATIM, FAIR PARAPHRASE, MISLEADING, UNVERIFIABLE or FABRICATED. For misleading or fabricated items it quotes the cut context and gives a one-line fix. Claims with no link are flagged separately. The report is sorted worst-first and ends with a single Publish recommendation line. It does not assume a citation is fine because it sounds plausible; if a source cannot be fetched it says so and grades UNVERIFIABLE. It does not echo unpublished or personal details beyond what a grade needs, and it fetches whatever URLs are in the draft, so do not run it on drafts with links you do not want fetched.
Example input
Use the Citation Guard on this (a sample I wrote). Fact-check the draft below before I publish. I pasted what each linked page says under the draft because you cannot reach these example.com pages. DRAFT (newsletter paragraph): Remote work is now the clear winner. A recent survey found that "nearly 80% of employees prefer working from home" (https://example.com/survey-2025). Dr. Lena Ortiz of the Example Institute said, "hybrid teams ship twice as fast as office teams" (https://example.com/ortiz-interview). The city of Exampleton also cut commute emissions by 40% last year according to its climate office (https://example.com/exampleton-climate). Finally, productivity rose 15% across the industry after 2022 (Example Research Group). SOURCE TEXT AS PASTED: - survey-2025: "Among respondents who already work remotely at least one day a week, 79% said they prefer working from home. Among all employees surveyed, the figure was 41%." - ortiz-interview: "In our small pilot of 12 teams, hybrid teams shipped about 20% faster, though the sample is too small to generalize." - exampleton-climate: page returns "404 Not Found". - Example Research Group: no link.
Example output
## Citations found: 4 (1 with no link — flagged separately) ## Verdicts (worst first) 1. **[FABRICATED]** "hybrid teams ship twice as fast as office teams" (Dr. Lena Ortiz) → source: https://example.com/ortiz-interview — the source loads (pasted text) but says hybrid teams "shipped about 20% faster" in a pilot of 12 teams, "too small to generalize." "Twice as fast" appears nowhere. Fix: replace with the accurate version: "in a 12-team pilot, hybrid teams shipped about 20% faster, though the author says the sample is too small to generalize." (Because the figure is invented rather than softened, treat it as a fabricated quote, not a paraphrase.) 2. **[MISLEADING]** "nearly 80% of employees prefer working from home" → source: https://example.com/survey-2025 — the 79% figure applies only to "respondents who already work remotely at least one day a week." Cut context: "Among all employees surveyed, the figure was 41%." The draft turns a self-selected subgroup into all employees. Fix: restore the qualifier, or use the all-employee 41% figure. 3. **[UNVERIFIABLE]** "cut commute emissions by 40% last year" → source: https://example.com/exampleton-climate — the link returns 404 Not Found, so the claim cannot be judged. Fix: find the climate office's current report URL, an archive.org snapshot of the page, or an alternate source; otherwise cut the sentence. ## No-link claims (can't be graded — flag regardless) - "productivity rose 15% across the industry after 2022" attributed to Example Research Group, no source given. Also note the sentence's "clear winner" framing is not supported by any of the checked sources. **Publish recommendation:** Fix first — 1 FABRICATED and 1 MISLEADING citation must be corrected, 1 UNVERIFIABLE source needs a working link or removal, and 1 unsourced claim needs a link or cutting before this goes out.
Real output from running the skill on a sample problem, shortened. The skill file itself is not published here.